agent-governance-toolkit

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Agent Governance Toolkit

Ship agents to production without losing sleep

[!IMPORTANT] Public Preview -- production-quality public preview releases. May have breaking changes before GA.

Policy enforcement, identity, sandboxing, and SRE for autonomous AI agents. One pip install, any framework.

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The Problem

Your AI agents call tools, browse the web, query databases, and delegate to other agents. Once deployed, they make decisions autonomously. You need answers to three questions:

1. Is this action allowed? An agent with access to send_email and query_database should not be able to drop_table. OAuth scopes and IAM roles control which services an agent can reach, not what it does once connected.

2. Which agent did this? In a multi-agent system, five agents might share a single API key. When something goes wrong, "an agent did it" is not an incident response.

3. Can you prove what happened? Auditors and regulators need tamper-evident records of every decision: what policy was active, what the agent requested, and why it was allowed or denied.

Prompt-level safety ("please follow the rules") is not a control surface. It is a polite request to a stochastic system. OWASP LLM01:2025 states this explicitly: "it is unclear if there are fool-proof methods of prevention for prompt injection." The published numbers back this up. Andriushchenko et al. (ICLR 2025) report 100% attack success rate on GPT-4o, GPT-3.5, Claude 3, and Llama-3 using adaptive attacks with logprob access and suffix optimization, evaluated against the JailbreakBench benchmark (Chao et al., NeurIPS 2024). Microsoft's own AI Red Teaming Agent formalizes Attack Success Rate (ASR), the rate of policy violations under adversarial input, as the canonical metric for this class of failure. Lessons from Red Teaming 100 Generative AI Products reinforces the point: "mitigations do not eliminate risk entirely" and red teaming must be a continuous process because model-layer defenses are probabilistic by construction.

AGT does not try to win that fight inside the prompt. Every tool call, message send, and delegation is intercepted in deterministic application code before the model's intent reaches the wire. Actions the AGT kernel denies are not "unlikely." They are structurally impossible. That is the difference between asking an agent to behave and making it incapable of misbehaving.

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Quick Start

Prerequisites: Python 3.11+

pip install "agent-governance-toolkit[full]"

Use the [full] extra for the quick-start imports below. The base agent-governance-toolkit wheel installs the compliance CLI only; the governance modules live in the consolidated core distribution. The agentmesh quick-start import remains the current wrapper API. Importing agent_os emits a DeprecationWarning because the old agent-os-kernel distribution is deprecated. Use agent-governance-toolkit-core (or the [full] extra that includes it) as the replacement distribution. Policy-engine host code uses the ACS SDK; agt-policies provides the one-way v4-to-v5 migration command. The pre-ACS agent_os.policies rule model is gone, and BREAKING_CHANGES.md lists its replacements.

For Claude Code, add AGT as a plugin marketplace and install the governance plugin:

/plugin marketplace add microsoft/agent-governance-toolkit
/plugin install agt-governance@agent-governance-toolkit

Govern any tool function in two lines:

from agentmesh.governance import govern

safe_tool = govern(my_tool, policy="policy.yaml")   # every call checked, logged, enforced

On every call, safe_tool evaluates the YAML policy, logs the decision to an audit trail, and raises GovernanceDenied when the policy blocks the action.

# policy.yaml
apiVersion: governance.toolkit/v1
name: production-policy
default_action: allow
rules:
  - name: block-destructive
    condition: "action.type in ['drop', 'delete', 'truncate']"
    action: deny
    description: "Destructive operations require human approval"

  - name: require-approval-for-send
    condition: "action.type == 'send_email'"
    action: require_approval
    approvers: ["security-team"]

>>> safe_tool(action="read", table="users")
{'table': 'users', 'rows': 42}

>>> safe_tool(action="drop", table="users")
GovernanceDenied: Action denied by policy rule 'block-destructive':
  Destructive operations require human approval

Or use the full AgentControl API for programmatic control:

from agent_control_specification import AgentControl

runtime = AgentControl.from_path(str("manifest.yaml"))
result = runtime.evaluate(
    "input",
    {
        "envelope": {"agent_id": "example-agent"},
        "input": {"body": {"action": "web_search", "params": {}}},
    },
)
print(result.verdict)
runtime.close()

Run the complete ACS email-tool example.

TypeScript

import { PolicyEngine } from "@microsoft/agent-governance-sdk";

const engine = new PolicyEngine([
  { action: "web_search", effect: "allow" },
  { action: "shell_exec", effect: "deny" },
]);
engine.evaluate("web_search"); // "allow"
engine.evaluate("shell_exec"); // "deny"

.NET

using AgentGovernance;
using AgentGovernance.Extensions.ModelContextProtocol;
using AgentGovernance.Policy;

var kernel = new GovernanceKernel(new GovernanceOptions
{
    PolicyPaths = new() { "policies/default.yaml" },
});
var result = kernel.EvaluateToolCall("did:mesh:agent-1", "web_search",
    new() { ["query"] = "latest AI news" });

// MCP server integration
builder.Services.AddMcpServer()
    .WithGovernance(options => options.PolicyPaths.Add("policies/mcp.yaml"));

Rust

use agent_governance::{AgentMeshClient, ClientOptions};

let client = AgentMeshClient::new("my-agent").unwrap();
let result = client.execute_with_governance("data.read", None);
assert!(result.allowed);

Go

import agentmesh "github.com/microsoft/agent-governance-toolkit/agent-governance-golang"

client, _ := agentmesh.NewClient("my-agent",
    agentmesh.WithPolicyRules([]agentmesh.PolicyRule{
        {Action: "data.read", Effect: agentmesh.Allow},
        {Action: "*", Effect: agentmesh.Deny},
    }),
)
result := client.ExecuteWithGovernance("data.read", nil)

CLI tools:

agt doctor                                        # check installation
agt verify                                        # OWASP compliance check
agt verify --evidence ./agt-evidence.json --strict # fail CI on weak evidence
agt red-team scan ./prompts/ --min-grade B         # prompt injection audit
agt lint-policy policies/                          # validate policy files

Full walkthrough: quickstart.md -- zero to governed agents in 5 minutes. 🌍 Also in: Español | 日本語 | 简体中文 | 한국어

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How It Works

Agent ──► Policy Engine ──► Identity ──► Audit Log
            (YAML/OPA/Cedar)  (SPIFFE/DID/mTLS)  (Tamper-evident)
                 │                                      │
                 ├── Allowed ──► Tool executes           │
                 └── Denied  ──► GovernanceDenied        │
                                                        ▼
                                                 Decision Record

Every layer is optional. Start with govern() and add layers as your risk profile grows. Most teams run policy enforcement + audit logging and never need the full stack.

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Packages

Package	Description
Agent OS	Policy engine, agent lifecycle, governance gate
Agent Control Specification (README)	Stateless, deterministic, fail-closed policy decision runtime (Rust core) backing the AGT policy layer
Agent Mesh	Agent discovery, routing, and trust mesh
Agent Runtime	Execution sandboxing with four privilege rings
Agent SRE	Kill switch, SLO monitoring, chaos testing
Agent Compliance	OWASP verification, policy linting, integrity checks
Agent Marketplace	Plugin governance and trust scoring
Agent Lightning	RL training governance with violation penalties
Agent Hypervisor	Execution audit, delta engine, in-memory commitment tracking, command denylist enforcement

Additional Capabilities

Capability	Description
MCP Security Gateway	Tool poisoning detection, drift monitoring, typosquatting, hidden instruction scanning (Spec)